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Shuttleworth Suggests 1-Way Valve For User Experience Testing
darthcamaro writes "No surprise but Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth has come out swinging in favor of the Linux desktop. Speaking at Linuxcon yesterday he detailed the things that he thinks Linux requires in order to win the desktop wars. Those include: co-ordinated software releases, better quality and design, some user experience testing and oh yeah, a dose of 'shut the f*** up' too. During his keynote, he extended an invitation to any open source application to submit their software for testing by user-experience experts. The sessions would be recorded for posterity, and the developer would not be able to interact with the user. "'If the developer is in the room, they have to say nothing. It's the shut the f*** up protocol,' Shuttleworth said. 'You sit and watch someone struggle with the software that you've so lovingly produced.'"
Users always ruin the best software.
He knows what he's talking about. We don't need more RMS but more people like Shuttleworth. Pragmatically minded, not focused only on ideals. If somebody wants follow only ideas I suggest Green Peace or monastery.
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
The problem is, we have this odd expectation that any software, from a compiler, to a game, to an office suite to a browser should be instinctive by use of other software. That is, they think Word processor == Word. So when you take another word processor such as Open Office, they expect it to work -exactly- like Word. Any differences are seen as "faults". Take someone fully new to computers and have them learn Linux or Windows and chances are they will figure out Linux faster. Take someone who has used Windows all their life and give them Linux they complain because things aren't exactly the same.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Because so many developers develop Open Source applications for personal satisfaction, they tend to focus on scratching their own itches.
A characteristic of usability testing is that your goal is to scratch the itch of your customers; your preferences have very little significance in the context of the test.
It doesn't take a genius to see a potential conflict in the two goals; on the other hand, a developer likes to see his code in actual use by actual human beings. To maximize this use, a developer must at least pay lip service to documentation and UI testing.
Many developers never make this conceptual leap, however.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
But, I'm afraid that these "experts" will be handpicked, for one set of characteristics or another.
Hopefully it's for UI design ability.
This is a good point - if software doesn't explain itself, then it is broken. I believe this holds all the way from the top level to the basics. If the architecture of the system isn't well signposted and comprehensible, it fails. If an icon meaning is murky and there are no tooltips, it fails. Now you always have to assume some basic level competence on the part of the user (eg. knowing to type man to get program info, or knowing how to click with a mouse) but once you're part that, there is no reason why programs can't be self-explanatory, or at the very least self-documenting. I don't know how many times I've torn my hair out because the 'Help' menu's only item was "About".
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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I would love for the Gnome developers to sit in on that session.
And then be beaten with sledgehammers until they understand that the goal should not be 'unconfigurable' but 'no configuration needed 90% of the time, and configurable the remaining 10% of the time'.
Desktop, workstation and server OS are obsolete ideas. In 20 years we probably won't even have these things or at least not worry about them. I can't say for certain what will replace the desktop, but I think it is going away in our lifetimes. Or perhaps we'll just have one platform that runs the same OS and same applications on our laptops, servers and phones.
They've been predicting the death of the desktop and a return to centralized computing for 20 years.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
Your fears are unfounded. If they were valid, we wouldn't have GNOME & KDE & the hundreds of other desktop environments and window managers.
In fact, this will make things even better. KDE will still be KDE, but it will be more usable. Same with GNOME. Some of the more esoteric systems will not change, because they aren't aimed at regular people.
There is no single Linux OS that can be bettered/ruined by a single person. There are literally *hundreds* of Linux OSs. And even if there were just one single Linux OS, how can you argue *against* usability testing? If there's just one OS, and it goes through testing, it will almost certainly be made better, but if you *don't* test, it will still be the single Linux OS that everyone has to use, it just won't be as good.
My biggest complaint about Linux on the desktop is the lack of a true universal UI
Not much of a problem though, for most people, Linux isn't Linux but a Linux distro, that is if you have Ubuntu, you get GNOME, if you have Kubuntu you get KDE. Similar to how you can either get Windows XP or Windows Vista/7 with different UIs.
and the difficulty in user software (a user should be able to run every application without tweaking text files)
Most user-level applications don't require you to tweak text files unless you need some obscure setting. A few "pro" level applications (as in, your going to be programming or know something about computers) use text files because they are easier to edit, debug and generally give support for a knowledgeable user.
and ease of administration
Compared to Windows, Linux administration is a breeze. A Linux system ran by a normal user who doesn't screw around as root, will remain stable. Simply going to a site can get you a virus in Windows. Because of this and the -large- amount of viruses on Windows, it is pretty much required to run a virus scan pretty often. With Linux, even if you are running a vulnerable everything, chances are you simply won't get a virus.
Plus, with Windows update you never know what you are going to get, "features" constantly creep in (remember the search bar that was a "critical update"?) and large changes are considered updates. It takes a lot more work administrating a small amount of Windows boxes compared to Linux.
When it achieves the same level or better of intuitiveness as Windows, then it can compete.
Windows has not intuitiveness. The only reason why we think it has is because most people have been using it for 20 some odd years. A lot of the Windows conventions have been -proven- to be counter intuitive and plain confusing (anyone else wonder why Add/Remove programs is called that even though you really can't add in any programs from there). Windows is terribly unfriendly, we just have gotten used to it.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The idea that an interface can be entirely judged by how well a user handles it in the first few minutes of exposure is, in my opinion, one of the bigger *problems* with UI design of late. A quality interface should both be immediately accessible, and SCALE WELL TO MORE ADVANCED USE CASES. In my experience, Gnome, OS X, and the bundled native applications that come with each currently fail miserably at the latter. The former head of Apple's UI team makes a pretty good case for this being a problem here, although the article focuses specifically on a facet of the OS X design philosophy which causes scalability issues, rather than the problem in general. To borrow a line from the article: "The beginner today will be the expert of tomorrow. The user with 200 photos today will be the user with 2000 a year from now. The user with 10 songs today will be the user with 100 songs six months from now. The user with one or two extra apps on the iPhone will be the user with 100 apps three months from now."
"Windows has not intuitiveness. The only reason why we think it has is because most people have been using it for 20 some odd years."
Exactly. Those old exclusivity agreements that MS insisted on are still paying off. People are used to MS, and anything different is "wrong".
Not to mention - Dell, Compaq, and other OEMS basically did all of MS hardware compatibility for them. Linux is still struggling to make some hardware work that was "designed for Windows".
Just a few years of unfair advantage can translate into decades of revenues.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It is 100% worthless.
I have a job to do, it involves many facets. I need to be able to do all of them. It isn't an option to say "No I am not going to do this part of my job." Well, my Windows system does 100% of what I need. It runs all the different kinds of software I need to do the various parts of my job. Ok, great. Now if Linux doesn't, it is worthless. Why? Because there's no point in running a different OS, if I still have to have Windows. If Linux does 80% of what I need, and Windows does 100%, then I might as well always be booted in to Windows. Why would I boot to a different OS, if it can't do everything?
Also, in terms of switching, it isn't good enough to say "You can do everything you need." It most certainly isn't worth a switch if you can do everything you need, but it is harder or more complicated to do. It isn't even good enough to say "You can do everything you need just as easy." Even if everything works as smooth as it does with what you currently have, it isn't worth switching because there's no advantage.
To be worth switching, you have to show how things are going to be BETTER. You have to show that you can do 100% of your job, and that it'll be better. Otherwise, it really isn't worth it.
I think that is part of the problem that often when people say "Well you can do what you need to do in Linux," they haven't really looked at what the person does. What the truth can be is "You can technically do what you need to do, but it'll be a whole lot of work, a good deal of retraining, and not nearly as smooth as what you have now."
Whatever. I had to explain disk images to a fucking Ivy League professor (a young one, not some doddering 80-year-old). People are fucking stupid. Especially Christians.
Was that before or after he told you how much money he makes, how he gets a year off after 6 years of work, and the awesome retirement plan? Not to mention the fact that he's paid to do jack-all.
I suppose I'd rather be uninformed (not stupid, as you imply) and on easy street, than whining about people like that on slashdot.
So what?
Look, your wife is well served by Windows. My father is well served by MacOS. Great. There are operating systems for them.
I use desktop Linux. I've used desktop Linux since 1996. I use it because it's well suited to my needs, and I do not care who else does or does not use it. If it fits their needs, they can use it. If something else fits their needs, they can use that. As long as there are enough users to keep development going, why would I care about more people adopting Linux?
In fact, changing Linux to make it appeal to your grandmother is just likely to make it less useful to me, because your grandmother and I have different needs. Which is why we just might need to use different operating systems.
So long as the data on the wire are standard, the end node operating system doesn't matter. Use what works for you. Shuttleworth cares about market share because he's in it for a buck. What's in it for the rest of us?
And in the end we still didn't do enough of usability testing (IMO), but such is life in commercial software development - you work against an arbitrary schedule.
Lemme let you in to a little MSFT secret here: what you witnessed was eyewash to make you feel better about your job.
The people that matter at Microsoft know the truth: that when you have a monopoly, all that's needed is to make sure the software doesn't crash on the launch presentation and that it supports as much hardware as possible. Achieve that, and you have achieved your annual bonus because even if MS released a C# horse's butt, billions of corporate slaves would still buy it and sign up for the upgrades. MS don't care about usability, because they have no reason to.
Remember that next time you open an attachment in Outlook, edit it, then try to work out where's it's been saved. Remember that when something you are writing in Word suddenly decides to turn into a bulleted list. Remember that when the format of the text you copy from one document is preserved in the target document and you have to do it again using "paste special." Above all, remember that these problems have been around in MS's products for over 20 years in some cases.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Go do volunteer basic computer literacy session for your local senior center. Don't try to convert them to linux or get them using Firefox or anything dumb like that. Just ask what their problems are, and how you can help. You will quickly understand how broken and unintuitive computer software is.
this is the same Mark Shuttleworth who removed update-notifier and then when hundreds of beta-testers said 'please put that back' on the infamous https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-notifier/+bug/332945 he personally said 'no, I'm not listening to you'.
He said it politely:
"I'm marking the bug wontfix on the basis that we are confident the behaviour as at 9.04 release is a good one. I wouldn't be surprised for the conversation to continue though I do ask that it continue in a good spirit. If significant data shows this to be a suboptimal choice in future, we will revisit the point, but for now the question is settled."
but it was still a WONTFIX in the face of overwhelming public opinion to the contrary.
I'll believe he listens to users when he actually listens to the users.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Well exactly. Someone up there in the comments mentioned how Open Source Developers like to "Scratch their own itch" - which in my opinion is really the wrong way to tackle a problem.
What the hell? I have a problem. I choose to fix it. I then offer my solution to the world at large, completely for free. Now you come along and tell me that I've solved my own problem wrong and should have somehow done it so it benefits you more.
WTF?
If you want me to work for you, then you have to pay me a lot of money. If you don't like the free itch-scratching stuff I give away, then ignore it ang go about your life as if it was never there.
Talk about a sense of entitlement...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
"Jim! I'm on the Lynooks now, and I printed off 500 envelopes for the newsletter, but they're all rotated! I put the envelopes in this way, but they come out all wrong!"
You seriously overestimate the ability of a standard plebe to adjust to any change.
I have a bunch of clients that I've switched to Linux that would undoubtedly take great umbrage at this characterization. People aren't stupid by nature. But when you pound it into their heads that they are stupid, they'll internalize it. Most people have heard nothing but "computers are too complicated for you to understand," so that's what they believe. But it's bullshit. And it's usually being fed to them by bad people who are trying to pick their pockets. Which I guess is capitalism in action and probably won't change. But what I'm fucking sick of is this attitude coming from the geek community that "the proletariat just will never be as smart as us." It's obnoxious, it's offensive, and most of all it's fucking wrong. I bet you can't skydive. But if someone taught you you could.
Humans are great at adapting, but only when forced.
You might be on to something with this. Damn good thing for my business that Microsoft is great at forcing people's hands.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
I always get asked, "How did you get good with computers?" To which I reply, "I was just able to read."
Well, the computer industry is slowly learning how to deal with people like you. More and more, they are implementing the "no documentation at all" standard. In the near future, it won't matter that you know how to read, because there will be no document anywhere for anything.
Actually, for Microsoft and Apple stuff, they're pretty much there now. Most of their new stuff has no written documentation at all. Their one remaining problem is that there are online forums where people actually write about such things, and google can quickly find them for you. But MS and Apple are working on ways of confounding that approach.
So soon you'll have no choice but to ask around to find out how to do something. If you do this via email or IM, your message will be hidden from others, so they won't be able to read the results.
I just wasted a number of hours trying to help a friend figure out how to deal with an incomprehensible Vista error message that makes logins totally fail. There are several thousand questions about the specific message online, and it appears that several hundred people have managed to fix it. But so far, none of the discussions we've found actually say what they did to fix it. So we've apparently hit a brick wall, despite all the bandwidth taken up by discussions of this particular problem. This illustrates how the MS community is learning to hobble those who can read, and ensure that there is nothing useful online on the topic.
Lessee; do I need a ;-) here?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.